John Ruskin

A Life

A man of prodigious genius, the eminently Victorian John Ruskin ranged over the entire landscape of human knowledge, from botany and geology to art criticism and social theory. He championed the painter J. M. W. Turner, the poetry of Wordsworth, and Gothic architecture. He inspired Proust and Gandhi. Works like his incomparable Stones of Venice fathered a new generation of aesthetes, while his indictment of English industrialism in The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century fathered the ethical socialists who would strive to establish a new political order for the working man.

Not only does this probing new biography celebrate the literary career that made Ruskin one of the most influential cultural figures of his day, it also illuminates the darker side of an emotionally unstable man whose obsessive desires thwarted his marriage to Effie Gray and later -- after the death of Rose La Touche, the young girl he consumingly loved -- drove him to extended bouts with madness. No passion, though, could dim the blazing creative energy of the intelligence that reimagined England's social destiny, as this estimable, crisply detailed volume sho